Tara's grandmother had sent an Easter book (Happy Easter Mouse!) along ahead of time, so we'd been reading at night about decorating and hiding eggs. On Saturday we set up a little egg painting station with food color dyes, q-tips, and a full body smock.
Jeff's parents - aka Maga and Papa - joined us on Skype to watch the whole messy process.
Tara had a good time painting the eggs and really enjoyed the crunching sound they made as she smooshed them into the table! We think they came out pretty well, if we do say so ourselves.
After Tara went to bed, I started in on my roll as Easter bunny. At not quite 2, candy isn't really a part of her life. Therefore, I wanted some simple, fun items to fill her basket with. As luck would have it, I was able to snag a fantastic bunny/baby doll to serve as the big ticket item. For over a year now I've had my eye on the amazing dolls made by Patatine. I hope to snag a full sized doll for Tara at some point down the line, but I am equally enamored by the baby dolls that she calls "Poppies". This year she made up a few with bunny ears and I knew one had to be mine...err, Tara's.
In addition to "Belle", our poppy, I added some clothes, shovels, and snacks sent from Grandma, some stickers, a purple glow stick butterfly wand, and a few special eggs.
I knew I wanted to set up an egg hunt for Tara, since I have fond memories of egg hunts in our backyard as a kid. I loved the idea of dying wooden eggs for her, both so that she'd have some sturdy eggs that would last long past Easter and so that we'd have a fun toy that we could use for learning colors. While the dying process was a bit time consuming, I really had a lot of fun creating these for her. Thanks to some blue lips, though, I now realize that I'll need to seal them in some way if they're going to stick around for long term play!
I also wanted to have some fun eggs with surprises inside, but without candy. Tara likes the Tinkerbell movies and I came across a pack of Tinkerbell and friends stickers, so I thought that would be a great prize for the inside of the eggs. Each fairy character has her own color - green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, and blue. By complete coincidence, the six pack of jewel eggs that I'd already bought came in those exact colors. I carefully cut each fairy out of the sticker sheet and tucked them into the eggs (as you can see above).
I may have gone a little nuts with the details the next day. I placed the eggs all over the yard and sprinkled "fairy dust" (glitter) all over each of the jeweled eggs...No judging! I was having fun.
Jeff brought Tara out with a little bucket and showed her how to find the first egg. We told her that the fairies had come, along with the Easter bunny. After the first one she caught on to the game and didn't have much trouble finding the rest.
While she examined her finds, I sneaked back inside and placed her Easter basket on her bed. Just the night before we had taken the front off of her crib, making it her new "big girl" bed. We felt that finding a basket of goodies in her bed might be a great way to get her excited about the big change. Once she'd picked up all the eggs, we told her that we'd seen the Easter bunny run out of her room and encouraged her to go see what he'd left.
She loved everything she found. Overall, Easter #2 was a rousing success. I can't wait for Easter #3!
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